Geek blogger Robert Scoble has now explained that he was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse. He wasn't accessing any personal data, but says: "I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on."

In a comment to Scoble's post, Dan Birdwhistell from FriendCSV (which I mentioned below as a better solution) points out that Plaxo could have done much the same thing without violating Facebook's terms of service, though scraping the (graphical) email addresses is another matter.

the Facebook API doesn't allow exporting of a crucial piece of data, email addresses. In fact, emails are shown as images instead of text on Facebook so that scripts cannot easily download them. So Plaxo avoided the API and went with screen scraping. They developed optical character recognition software to recognize email addresses and add them to the export.

Plaxo then got a few journalists and bloggers to try it out, apparently -- and if so, stupidly -- without talking to Facebook first. As Arrington says: "Robert Scoble was Plaxo's lab rat in this experiment. I'm glad I wasn't one, too."